Fairlie Place: The Eastern Railway celebrated three decades of the computerised passenger reservation system (PRS) on Tuesday.

The first PRS counter in the country was inaugurated by the late Madhav Rao Scindia, the then railway minister, at Howrah station on November 7, 1987.

"The celebration was long due. The decision to digitise the ticketing process revolutionised railway journeys. It has emerged as one of the largest commercial networks of computer hardware, software and database in the world," said Harindra Rao, the general manager, Eastern Railway.

Also present at the programme was Sanjoy Mookerjee, a retired financial commissioner of the Railway Board, who was part of the project to start the PRS system.

He had spoken to Metro (When a gamla helped book a rail ticket, November 7) about the PRS system completing 30 years.

Railway officials spoke of the chaotic manual reservation counters that were operational before the digital transformation. "It was a tedious exercise. Frequent power cuts only made things worse," a railway official said.

Today, the PRS has evolved into a unified ticketing network. The PRS hub in Calcutta alone serves six zones, having 754 trains in its database and catering to more than 3 lakh passengers every day.

The hub runs 2,500 ticketing counters across 16 states and one Union Territory.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands has four counters. At the other end of the network, sits a counter at Thegu in Sikkim, located at 14,000 feet above the sea level - the highest such counter in the country. "The networking equipment in Thegu is kept warm by placing them above burning coal," said a S.S Gehlot, the principal chief commercial manager of Eastern Railway.

The unreserved ticketing segment was brought under the computerised PRS in 2004.